In the clip, children in white T-shirts printed with a Ugandan flag and a Lily Jay Foundation logo cheer and wave lollipops. “We washed them, gave them new clothes, everything a child needs to grow up in a positive environment,” says the woman in the video. She is Lily Jay Hinson, a 31-year-old Australian influencer, and she posted it in February to say she had opened an orphanage in Uganda.
ABC News Verify says her appearance in that video was AI-generated, and so were the children with the lollipops. The Daily Mail’s account of the ABC findings has led to Hinson being branded “Belle Gibson 2.0”.
What the tell-tale glitches looked like
The ABC pointed to flaws a careful viewer can spot. The banner behind Hinson, carrying her foundation’s logo, seemed to vanish at points in the video. Another angle showed the back of one of the shirts she handed out, and the foundation’s name appeared to be misspelled. The video has since been deleted from her page.
Other clips on her account appear to contain AI imagery too. The clearest is one of Hinson in front of a truck bearing the foundation’s logo, which she said was “off to Gaza” with supplies. Moments in, the logo on the truck clips over her arm, even though the vehicle is parked behind her.
Then there is the award. In May, a press release from the PR company Real Media Group said Hinson had won the Austral-Global Excellence Award for Humanitarian Leadership, with two photos of her smiling as she accepted it. According to the ABC, analysis showed both photos carried the ChatGPT SynthID watermark, which marks them as AI-generated. Real Media Group’s own website lists Hinson as co-founder of the company.
The woman behind the account
Hinson is from Queensland and started out on the Sunshine Coast, where her first posts from the early 2010s were mostly grainy photos of her dancing in studios. She later moved to the Gold Coast and began posting luxury cars, designer clothes and hotels. Holidays followed in Turkey, Dubai, Thailand, Greece and Italy, and she later travelled to Malaysia, Hawaii, Switzerland and Tuscany. In 2017 she released a debut single and music video titled Renovate.
She appeared to settle in Thailand around 2023. After a selfie on May 7, 2023 she disappeared from social media for about a year, then returned on July 3, 2024 with a selfie and regular posts from Turkey. Later that month she confirmed she had lived in Thailand for two years. The ABC reports that her personal Instagram account is run from Cyprus.
In August 2024 her lifestyle posts stopped and she began putting hypothetical questions about religion to followers. By late 2024 she was styling herself as a Muslim influencer, criticising atheism and comparing Islamic and Christian beliefs. In September the Lily Jay Foundation got its own Instagram account, showing charitable acts across Africa and the Middle East, and those are the videos now accused of using AI. Hinson has almost 3 million followers across her personal and business accounts.
Some online claims say she danced at the Moulin Rouge in Paris and at the Palazzo Manheim in Germany. The Daily Mail found nothing verifiable about the Moulin Rouge. It also reports that her IMDb page shows she never got past auditions on So You Think You Can Dance Australia.
